Unintended Consequences by RT

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A friend of mine is an owner of a local gym. A few months back he added a hypnotherapist to his staff to help clients with exercise motivation, visualizing results, weight loss, and really anything else that could help improve a client’s fitness. I remember being skeptical when Dave was telling me about his news staff member, but he was a firm believer that it would help his clients reach their fitness goals. Last night Dave and his family came over for a little BBQ. While sitting around the grill Dave started telling me about one of his clients that was using hypnotherapy to reach his fitness goals.
The client would always set goals with his trainer and put in a good effort, but he had an issue of oversleeping and not having enough time to get to the gym. When Dave added the hypnotherapist to his staff the trainer recommend to the client that he work with the hypnotherapist. The client agreed and started biweekly thirty-minute sessions. The first thing the therapist had the client do was write down his fitness goals and bring pictures of what he wanted to look like for visualizing.
Starting out a change was not noticed in the client’s gym attendance, but eventually the therapist worked out a clever use of technology to aid the client. The therapist had the client download an alarm clock app to his phone that allowed him to choose an mp3 to play in the morning. The therapist then recorded a hypnotic message to work as the alarm. In the message the client was told that his morning routine was to get up so he could make himself into the images that he visualized. The client was then instructed get ready for the gym, and jogs the half-mile to the gym. Instantly the trainer noticed results. The client was showing up every morning on time and ready to work out. The trainer claimed that it seemed like he was in kind of a trance until he entered the gym; he wouldn’t stop on his route to the gym and often couldn’t even tell the trainer what the weather outside had been like.
The clients improved attendance at the gym lead to great increases in his personal fitness and in six months had packed on the mussel that he had always worked for. Two weeks ago the trainer was surprised when the client did not show up on time. Since the hypnotic alarm clock was introduced to the client he had always been on time to his personal training sessions. Fifteen minutes later the client show up to the gym. Instead of sporting a head of thick brown hair the client now had a freshly shaved head. When the trainer commented on the haircut the client look confused and touched his head. Feeling his smooth head the client then went over to the mirror on the other side of the gym and stared in disbelief. Apparently the client had no recollection of the haircut. The trainer quizzed the client on his morning and as usual all the client remembered was showing up at the gym. The trainer and client decided to jog back to the client’s apartment where they found clippers, a razor, shaving cream and a pile of hair in the bathroom. The client and the trainer decided that he must have done it when he was in his hypnotic trance, but they didn’t know why.
Back at the gym they talked to they hypnotherapist who quickly realized that the majority of the pictures they had used for visualization had been of bald muscular bound guys. The client had been instructed to work to achieve the body image that he had been visualizing and because he had hair and the guys in the picture did not he subconsciously decided to remove his hair. The client in essence had achieved his perfect body image. The client laughed about the situation and said that thankful the hair would grow back.
About a week and a half later the trainer noticed that the client still had a completely smooth head. The trainer asked the client if he had decided to keep his head shaved. The client explained that he was going to grow it back out, but every day when he got back from the gym he would noticed that the razor and shaving cream were by the sink. Shaving his head had become part of his subconscious morning routine and he couldn’t break out of it. When he had realized that he was continuing to shave his head ever morning he first started working with the hypnotherapist to break the morning routine, but eventually decided that it was a good look for him.

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